Case Number 20226: Small Claims Court

VALHALLA RISING

The Charge

In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king.

The Case

Madd Mikkelson (Casino Royale) is One Eye, a barbarian prisoner forced
to fight for his Pagan captors' entertainment. He escapes along with a young boy
(Maarten Stevenson, Blessed), and the two join up with a group of Viking
warriors headed off to fight the Crusades. The expedition takes a disastrous
turn, and the group finds that they are drifting onto a freshwater lake
bordering the New World. Isolated on foreign land, the Vikings begin to turn on
each other as the natives pick them off one by one. With their numbers
dwindling, One Eye is forced to protect the young boy at all costs.

Valhalla Rising is to period war films what The Proposition is
to American Westerns: it is a dark, bleak, cinematic punch in the stomach to
Viking and Crusade themed films. It's as if David Fincher and Werner Herzog
decided to make The 13th Warrior or The New World.

I haven't seen any of Nicholas Winding Refn's films (among them
Bronson and the Pusher trilogy), but after watching Valhalla
Rising I'm certainly going to queue up his back catalog in my viewing
future. Refn's directorial style is sparse and experimental, stripping
Valhalla Rising to the narrative's bone. This isn't what you'd imagine
from a Viking war film. It's as un-Hollywood as a film can be, free from the
trappings of giant castle sets and one-thousand men battles, instead focusing on
the protagonist's journey from slavery into the heart of hell.

Madd Mikkelson's One Eye is simultaneously a Christ and anti-Christ messiah
in the film. He is a feral animal, a mute beast who expresses himself most
clearly with bone crunching violence. He communicates through his young boy
sidekick without ever speaking himself, is prone to blood-soaked psychic visions
of the future, and walks through the film fearlessly as a man prepared for doom.
In a word: badass.

Through his relationship with The Boy (a soothsayer), One Eye commands his
quest with the hand of God -- angry, wrathful, and grossly protective of the
innocent. He's the ultimate Alpha male, a disfigured creature with a tenuous
grasp of humanity that separates him from the monstrous Pagans and Christians.
Mikkelson commands the film in a perfect performance, conjuring doom with a
glance of his eye and a slash of his axe. Maarten Stevenson is his equal on
every level. The Boy is crafted as One Eye's foil: pure hope and innocence in a
world ruled by the madness of fanatical practitioners of Pagan and Christian
religions.

The supporting characters and their players are memorable only as archetypes
-- the blindly fanatical Viking Leader, the nihilistic Pagan Leader, the
Crusader that doubts his faith, etc. Refn wisely wraps these characters purely
around Mikkelson's apocalyptic performance, never catering to character moments
or quirks common to the supporting fodder of "Men on a Mission" type
films. They handle little dialogue (according to IMDb, there is less than 120
lines in the whole movie) and fall like stones as One Eye and the elements
dictate.

It should be reiterated that, despite sporting an action-hero like
protagonist and its fair share of fight scenes, Valhalla Rising isn't a
traditional action film. Really, it's barely an action film, positing more
existential interests than slam-bang action. It is the sort of film your average
Joe or Jane Six Pack picks up at his video store after a long week and finding
The Expendables out of stock. He or she returns it to the store counter
the following Sunday, complaining that there's barely any dialogue in it, most
of it is just people walking, there's no story -- all because Valhalla
Rising is an experimental film at its core, with action taking a backseat to
the film's preoccupation with atheism and religious extremism.

It is highly successful as a one-of-a-kind, freak-out version of its
subgenre that I can't recommend enough. It's engrossing, entertaining,
thoughtful, touching and more than a little trippy -- the sort of film that
makes me love films all the more.

The DVD itself sports a beautiful transfer with slight grain and brief bouts
of pixel clustering, while the 5.1 audio mix channels a paranoid rock soundtrack
and incredibly sharp sound effects to couch jumping results. Extras are nil,
with only a trailer to show for its efforts.